4.8.2022
OPX and their goal
- Develop solutions for socially responsible investment strategies
- Increase cash flow to charitable purposes

How to assess financial performance?
- Data collection
- Key Performance Indicators

Phase 1 – how to harvest and analyze the data?
- A webcrawler that could collect data across different websites?
This would be too difficult and it would only work with some organizations
- A code that could read PDF?
Phase 2 – Exploring three options
- Financial statements in yearly reports published as PDF
Issue: Financial statements are not always published as text
- Webscraping financial statements from Proff.no
Issue: Proff.no does not allow webscraping!
- Webscraping the Brønnøysund registry
Issue: The registry does offer API access, but access costs about 500k kr
Workarounds…
- Proff.no: It maaay be legal to manually download the websites as HTML instead of scraping
- Brønnøysund: We attempted to request a temporary access to XML documents
… and why they did not work
- Different accounting divisions at Proff.no and Brønnøysund prohibited extracting the correct sums OPX wanted
- Not all NGOs publish their financial statements and certainly not for every year
- Which led us to Phase 3 - scrapping the scraping

Data collection
Data description
Findings
Limitations and steps forward
Our experience
- Unsolvable case due to non-existent data
- Hard to create credible KPIs due to limited knowledge of economics and the NGO sector
- Insight into real-life work challenges - the clash between what is desired and what is possible